"Through July 17, 2017, Skylake devices on the supported list will also be supported with Windows 7 and 8.1. During the 18-month support period, these systems should be upgraded to Windows 10 to continue receiving support after the period ends. After July 2017, the most critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for these configurations, and will be released if the update does not risk the reliability or compatibility of the Windows 7/8.1 platform on other devices."

Now in a new blog post (via ZDNet) Microsoft has confirmed it has extended full support for Windows 7 and 8.1 on Skylake PCs by another 365 days:

To help provide greater flexibility for customers who have longer deployment timeframes to Windows 10, the support period for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 devices on Skylake systems will be extended by one year: from July 17, 2017 to July 17, 2018.

Also, after July 2018, all critical Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 security updates will be addressed for Skylake systems until extended support ends for Windows 7, January 14, 2020 and Windows 8.1 on January 10, 2023.

Microsoft said it was pushing back the end of support "to help our customers purchase modern hardware with confidence, while continuing to manage their migrations to Windows 10."

technically this is so pointless .. since there are very few business computers with skylake that run something else other than Win 10. On the gamer side we only have paranoic people about how Win 10 will invade their home and steal all their porn.

I just don't understand what makes skylake so special in that in needs special support to work with 7 and 8? I don't ever really recall this kind of limitations ever before, since windows 2. It's more like, old processors won't work anymore (like enhanched mode wouldn't work on 80286 processors and older), but to say a new processor will not work? So strange. I'm sure I could load up windows 3.0 on my 5820K cpu and it would work.